This exhibition by Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai, “with history in a room filled with people with funny names 4,” centers around a remarkable video that explores universal themes—the human and the animal, memory and technology, life and death—from some unusual perspectives. Adopting the meandering formal style of Chris Marker’s classic cine-essay Sans Soleil, Arunanondchai makes poetic and absorbing use of found and original footage. Opening with a tender scene of his grandmother handling various everyday objects, her memory of their functions perceptibly slipping away, it soon moves on to stranger territory, setting oneiric encounters with spirit creatures against scenes of public mourning for Thailand’s recently deceased king, Bhumibol Adulyadej.
Bracketing the video are two installations, one standing in for a domestic interior, the other representing a fantastical garden. In the former, humble objects—painted handkerchiefs, decorated tissue boxes,
a stenciled shirt—are arranged on simple shelves. In the latter, a densely ornate environment incorporating tree roots, banana leaves, car parts and a host of other components, both natural and constructed, is crisscrossed by tubes carrying indigo dye, the cultural associations of which are plumbed by Annie Godfrey Larmon in an accompanying text. Together the three works fuse the impulses to document and to mythologize in some truly fascinating ways.